Tech Environment

I’m sometimes asked which tools I use for a particular job, so here goes:

At home I work on a Dell XPS Laptop with a dual boot setup of Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 8.1. When developing I usually hook-up a small external screen.

I use Eclipse, with the Aptana extension installed for Java and PHP programming. I like the fact that I can use the same editor on both Linux and Windows, and for C, Java, Python and Web development. I also use Microsoft Visual Studio for C#, and PyCharm for Python development. For smaller editing tasks I use Notepad++ on Windows and Vim on Ubuntu.

Chrome is my default browser (although I did use Firefox for a while). I especially like the developer tools.

I use Mercurial and Git, combined with Bitbucket and Github respectively, for version control. Currently I am most comfortable with Mercurial.

Just about everything that isn’t code related goes in my Dropbox folder, of which I’m a big fan.

I use cloud based tools, especially Google’s, for as much as possible. I like the portability they provide and in general trust ‘them’ to look after my data more than I trust myself!

Top 10 consumer software tools:

Gmail

Google Drive

Dropbox

LastPass

Pocket (saving articles I come across on the web for reading on my iPad later)